To be completely clear. We do not spam anyone ever. Never have done. Never will do. If we did this, we would quite rightly expect our ISP (who has hosted our servers for 6 years now) to shut us down immediately.

What you are receiving are "spoofed" emails. These are emails that seem to be from us, but are actually sent by someone else altogether. The sender may be a nasty individual manually sending spoofed emails, or may even be a virus that is sending spoofed emails automatically. You can find out more about email spoofing at this link.

We keep detailed mail server logs and know exactly what emails are sent and received by our mail servers. We also know our email server is definitely not what is called an 'open mail relay'. In other words it is physically impossible for anyone other than people employed by our company to send any genuine emails from prosperoassociates.com

Spamming typically occurs in bursts. That is, the spammer sends thousands of emails over a few days - seldom more than a week - then moves on before the Internet authorities can catch up. By the time we - or anyone else - reacts, it is generally too late to do anything positive about it. We see this with spoofing of our prosperoassociates.com domain name. This may occur once every 2-3 years and lasts only a few days. The latest wave of spoof emails seems to have occurred over Easter 2006. The spammers may have chosen that period because they knew people who could stop the spam at source would be away on holiday.

We know when this is happening. Not because we are sending the spam (it is not us doing that), but because we collect any bounced emails. So if the spammer spoofs

to: kim@hotmail.com
from: jhyt@prosperoassociates.com

in the email , then if the target email address kim@hotmail.com does not exist the automatic notification that the email has 'bounced' is sent to jhyt@prosperoassociates.com, which we then receive.

How to stop this problem: There is unfortunately no easy answer. Email is fundamentally insecure. The techical people who control Internet standards are very aware of the scale of the problem and are working on solutions. In the meantime, you can help by making your own PC as secure as possible. Get a proper firewall. Get good anti-virus software. Doing this gives spammers less chance of hijacking your PC to use for their spam.

We are not spamming you. We are as much victims of spam as you are.